Ryan The Republican – Another Comic? You Wish.

We can all relax now. The 7th term Paul Ryan (R-Rep. from Wisconsin) has seen the way to fix the health care system. Well, not really fix the system, but to get rid of the unsustainable Medicare program. Ryan proposes that the Government limit Medicare to people who are now 55 and older, and to create a new system that will provide subsidizes to future retirees who will select from private companies’ insurance plans. Not government vouchers, which Ryan the Republican knows is an unacceptable concept/term; but government subsidizes for insurance premiums. Because we all know that a voucher is a designated amount of money collected from our taxes, whereas a subsidy is a designated amount of money from our …? Well, anyway a subsidy which will solve our Medicare problem.

Ryan’s plan solves the Medicare problem because after about 40 or 50 years, the Medicare problem will be uhh! ... dead. And because Medicare is over, there is no government funding problem and no Medicare entitlement program. I am not sure Ryan has thought about it in detail yet, but there will be a new Government program and bureaucracy for administering the Ryan Economic Administration and Management Entitlement Department (REAMED) to collect the taxes required for the vouchers (sorry, subsidies), to maintain records of payments by individual, determine eligibility and allocation of payment amounts to individual retirees, and to engage in all the other governmental, legislative, bureaucratic, and budgetary activities that are necessary to have a government program, particularly an entitlement program. So that is one way the Ryan’s plan is different than Medicare.

But surely when we examine his plan in greater detail, we will see that there are many ways that it will reduce health care costs for the American public. For example, instead of using the leverage that the Government has under Medicare with health care providers, it will rely upon the insurance companies to not really care about the cost of services rendered. Fortunately, the additional cost that private insurers will impose on the health care industry segment, the providers will spontaneously and wit a self-sacrificing spirit reduce their costs. This is not to even mention the additional costs for insurance and health care that will be funneled into political contributions to support even more legislative efforts to reduce any leverage that a tax payer would have against the health care industry.

I also suspect that unlike Medicare, which collects taxes from current wage earners and spends these funds immediately for those retirees needing payouts to cover their incurred health care expenditures. The new Ryan plan would collect taxes for a number of years and then after you retire return those funds back to you. Oops! Who pays for the Medicare costs incurred during this transition period? Oh, yes. You do. Those funds collected will I suspect be spent and then Ryan’s plan will be spending it’s incoming taxes on the out-going subsidies (vouchers) just like Medicare.

Al least we won’t have the same issues with the current system. Ryan’s plan doesn’t involve creating the dreaded ‘death panels’ the Republicans’ terrorize those ill-equipped to relate to reality. His plan employs two paths simultaneously. First, those who can’t afford a private plan can just expire, the self-directed death panel so to speak. Second, the pre-existing private health insurance companies’ claims review/approval boards, the corporate death panels who are eager to kill grandma to insure a good bottom line, will execute their profit-motivated approaches as they do today.

There are going to be many similar superior differences just like those mentioned above that will make the Ryan Plan clearly different from the Medicare system. I am overjoyed with the prospects of such a wondrous plan. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am already too old to have such governmental largess granted to me.

What does annoy me is that Rep. Ryan, just as ineptly as any Democrat, does not understand the problem. He has the answer though, a feat that cannot be matched by the best minds in any other field or area of life. What a remarkable individual he must be to be able to solve a problem without a clue as to what the problem itself actually is. It never amazes me to see politicians take an important issue and turn it into a political platform without any notion of what they are doing or what its consequences are. The short-view of the small minded to address the complexity of a problem that has eluded his peers for generations, and which cannot seek a solution that would be more profitable for the private sector, more effective for the medically in need, and far cheaper for the American people.